Turkish delight in epic film Fetih 1453
The turbans-and-testosterone CGI retelling of sultan’s conquest of
Constantinople feeds on appetite for imperial Ottoman past
Fiachra Gibbons
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 12 April 2012 15.33 BST
More than 5 million Turks have been to see the CGI tale of Mehmet II’s
capture of Constantinople – part of a resurgence of interest in the
country’s imperial past.
It’s the film that is making millions of Turkish hearts swell with
even more patriotic pride than usual. Fetih 1453, a
turbans-and-testosterone epic, has not just smashed all Turkish box
office records with its all-action, CGI retelling of Mehmet II’s
capture of the old Byzantine capital, Constantinople, it is being
hailed as a reaffirmation that a resurgent Turkey still has
world-conquering blood in its veins.
As the religious-minded daily newspaper Zaman noted, “Turks are
feeling imperial again” after a decade of unprecedented economic
growth, and are turning more and more toward their Ottoman ancestors
for inspiration – in foreign policy as much as in interior design,
food and fashion, with a neo-Ottomanist push to reassert Turkish
diplomatic hegemony over the sultans’ former Arab and eastern European
domains.
The film’s religious overtones – with a walk-on part for the prophet
Muhammad, predicting the old Roman capital would one day fall to the
faithful – have attracted a new, observant audience to cinemas and
especially endeared it to the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
chiming as it does with his vision to “raise devout generations … who
should embrace our historic values”.
Some in his party are now demanding it be shown in schools as an
antidote to Hollywood’s “crusader mentality” – not that the film is
itself entirely innocent of historical licence, for example its
portrayal of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, as a hedonist
(he was mostly celibate); the city’s magnificence (it had been
comprehensively sacked by western crusaders in 1204); and the fact
that there were far more Greeks fighting for the sultan than defending
the walls. Nearly as many of Mehmet’s soldiers would have been praying
to the Virgin on the morning of the final assault in May 1453, as to
Allah.
In another scene, sappers tunnelling under the immense land walls that
had not been breached in 1,000 years, blow themselves up with a cry of
“Allahu Akbar” rather than be captured by the Byzantines. In reality,
Mehmet’s tunnellers were orthodox Christians drafted from Serbia’s
silver mines.
While the public may be besieging cinemas to see the film, the
critical verdict has been far from unanimous, even at Zaman. The
critic Emine Yildirim warned that it pandered to “extreme nationalism”
and old Turkish stereotypes of their Christian neighbours. “As we are
so infuriated by seeing demeaning and Orientalist depictions of the
east in western blockbusters, we should at least have the decency not
to make the same mistakes,” she said.
“Fetih 1453 is a muddled pool of hypocrisy. While it feeds on the
common paranoia of seeing the west as unwelcoming and disreputable, it
reinforces our aspirations for superiority.”
As if to prove her point, the commentator Burak Bekdil received a
death threat after he satirised this tendency to supremacism. What
next, he quipped, a film called Conquest 1974 to celebrate the Turkish
invasion of Cyprus, or Extinction 1915, the Armenian genocide?
“Instead of shyly remembering 1453, Turks remind the entire world that
their biggest city once belonged to another nation and was captured by
the sword. It is quite hard to think of the British commemorating the
conquest of London or the Germans that of Berlin.”
Infuriated bloggers later posted that Bekdil was an “ignoble Greek”
who “should not be allowed to breathe air”. Another pronounced that
his byline photo betrayed “Armenian features”.
Turkey’s foremost film critic, Alin Tasçiyan said with nostalgic
Ottomania riding high, it was only natural film-makers should look
again at the Ottoman legacy, particularly since it was deliberately
neglected by Atatürk and his secularist successors. “It is about time
we looked at the empire in a more objective way. It was a huge
civilisation, why demonise it? It had good points and bad points.
“But let’s get one thing clear, this film is not that. Nor is it a
movie made with political or religious motives. It’s purely
commercial, very cleverly playing to the gallery.”
She said there was huge interest in Ottoman history precisely because
it was taught so little and so badly. “History teaching in Turkish
schools is rigidly nationalistic. The Ottomans were the opposite. They
themselves were very mixed. At school, we were told the Ottomans
conquered half the world then suddenly became bad, no explanation.
Before you know it the sultan is plotting with the British. Luckily
Ataturk came along and saved us.”
Yildirim said the film revealed a telling contradiction in the way
Turks see themselves: on the one hand, an “authoritarian drive for
power, but then trying to make amends with an all-embracing tolerance
which you see in the final scene in which Mehmet II, having entered
[the church of] Hagia Sophia, holds a blond child in his arms and
declares, ‘Not to worry, people of Constantinople, you can practise
your religion however you like.'”
Nothing sells like nationalism in Turkey, and the film’s
director/producer, Faruk Aksoy – who has already made the $17m (£11m)
budget back three times – is planning another epic on Gallipoli, where
Atatürk, the founder of the modern republic, fought off the British.
It’s a fair bet it won’t be Churchill’s finest hour.